UF-AC20-39
A heavy modification to the old autocannon to bring it up to speck to work against enemy light-armour. We switch it to dedicated belt-fed operation for use in vehicles or prepared positions with a crew. We introduce maganese into its construction to improve the structure and reduce the amount of material required. And generally overhaul the design to ease construction, reduce weight, and increase reliability. We then produce a spiked bipod which can be hammered into the ground(Force directed around the attachment point, obviously) to provide a stable prepared postion for ambushes and defensive positions.
We switch the ammunition to an armoured penetrator-cap backed with high-explosives to either penetrate then explode into soft targets or explode then penetrate into hard targets and attempt to refine the shape with our aerodynamics experience from the past decades. We then extend the ammunition until it can penetrate a recreation of the Raider's armour with sustained fire, at least one round in ten. Finally we revise the belts to ease construction and improve reliability.The new fighter steers like a cow and moved like cow, but takes a hit like an elephant, so long as you don't touch the coolant... and hits like a tuck... Resilience is very nice, but you need to hit the enemy. Agility was great at that early-war and when dealing with stable turrets that can track you. Speed is great late-war when they sorted out all the formation flying and such that could keep people off of your tail, and help people set up for passes and such. Resilience is great when you have a competent fighter and want to keep it fighting. I love resilience, it can make up for lacking in extreme performance, but only when paired with a basic level of competence in actually fighting, which doesn't seem to be present in the new fighter...
I would encourage you to go with a V engine rather than a radial. Modern piston aircraft tend to rely on V engines.
I would urge you to read what others have to say about radial vs V engine.
"While the inline was more streamlined the radial could use the air cooling to produce thrust. The air comes in cold and leaves hot (like a jet). The radial saved weight by eliminating the liquid cooling system but the inline could be run more intensively because the engine cooling was more effective, resulting in smaller engines for the same power output. The radial was less vulnerable and eliminated the logistics of liquid coolant. By the way, about 50% of the cooling in a radial is from the oil, so even a radial is partially liquid cooled."
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down vote
Radial engines are better from the durability/mechanics point of view: having radially distributed pistons distributes the loads better and the shaft will be stressed equally from all directions. For resonance reasons you will (almost) always have an odd number of pistons.
Times have changed and manifacturing techniques have improved*. The benefits of the radial design justify no more the additional complexity and design effort required**, but even then some are still produced today. Also, in some cases engines are simply car engines re-adapted for an aircraft, cutting sensibly on development costs."
Radial is more reliable and scales up better, V has heat-buildup issues that make more cylinders difficult, and put more strain on the shaft. Cooling and charging is more effective and easier on Vs because you only have one or two tight strips to worry about, while the radial has many evenly-spaced strips so you need to access its whole surface, and the Vs concentrate their heat, so the cooling is more important, and their concentrated psition means that you can ramp up the force a bit more if you have the cooling to support it, but that has issues...
I would suggest that you want radials for single-engine craft and Vs for multiengine craft. The resilience is less important if you have redundancy and engine-scaling is less of an issue if you have lots of them. If you replace the one V12 with two V8s then it makes a lot of sense, as does replacing one V12 with one O14. A single V12 however seems like a bad prospect. One hit on the cooling makes for a mission-kill and the uneven stresses limit the power you can apply, requiring overengineering, and increasing maintenance.
Also also, experience with air-cooling(Especially when compressed) and circular systems helps build a foundation for jet-engines...
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Topic: Intercontinental Arms Race: Finale (Read 604411 times)